


The Education Of A Master

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Genetic Engineering, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, bildungsroman, la ville c'est moi!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:20:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14825133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Colette Voltaire knew what her destiny was. She just had to catch up to it.





	The Education Of A Master

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @docmatoi for betaing!

\--

Colette Voltaire's earliest memory is of her brother Louis patiently tracing the shape of a gear for her while she sat on his shoulders and made inquisitive noises. It was a working gear, part of the automatic watering system in the family greenhouses, and if it were moving it would have been spinning a mist nozzle across a flat of tiny mouseblossoms. They were asleep and harmless in the midday sun. "See there," Louis said to her, "where the hose comes in?" 

"Oui," she said, although it might have been closer to "Wheeeeee!".

"What do you think happens when water comes through it?" 

Colette looked at the gear to see if it was a trick question, but she'd seen gardeners with hoses and it seemed obvious. "Spins," she declared.

"Right. Good girl."

\--

She doesn't remember her mother because she never had one, not really. Artificial wombs being one of those strangely intractable problems, she'd emerged into the world with the help of an experimentally-minded lady with a wife and five children of her own to occupy her time. The other third of her genes came from four different sources, two of which her father had, he explained to her, had promising results with before. 

The promising results in question were her fifty-nine-percent-brother Thierry and her seventy-percent-sister Julian, and she'd spent a while lurking around their labs to see if there was any particular feeling of connection, but as fascinating as Julian's light fountains were, the extra fifteen years of study proved too much of a leap. "Come back when you know chromatographic electrodynamics," Julian told her, not unkindly. 

"So explain it to me," Colette said, and put her hands on her hips and tried to look as stern as a five-year-old could.

"I don't have _time_. You have to know dynamic magnetism first, and for that you have to know atomic shell theory and calculus, and I bet you don't even know algebra yet."

"I can pick it up," she said. It couldn't be that hard. They taught algebra in ordinary lycées.

Julian wiped her forehead and looked tired and old, and privately Colette resolved to have solved the biomedical problem of needing sleep by the time _she_ was twenty. "I'm busy. Look, go tell Louis you want to learn algebra and he can pick out a book for you. He keeps up with that sort of thing. Now go away, I'm in the middle of seeding crystals."

\--

By the time she was six and old enough to appreciate it, her father came to put her to bed whenever there wasn't a crisis or a diplomatic meeting; it averaged, Colette worked out, five and seven-tenths times a week. Sometimes he was late and she would sit up waiting and reading; sometimes he only came as an image, when, he would tell her apologetically, his subordinates were being _particularly_ incompetent and he couldn't get back to the château. 

"Can't you make better ones, papa?" Colette asked him, because it seemed obvious.

Her father ruffled her hair, which was an extremely odd sensation when he wasn't really there, like someone waving a charged spoon over it. Louis had been showing her static electricity tricks last week. "I try, chérie. But most of your sisters and brothers are fine scientists and terrible strategists. Paris needs both."

"Oh." Colette tried to think about this, but it was a very big idea. Cities were complicated, she'd caught on to that much. "Why both?"

It should have been obvious and she felt stupid asking, but her father just looked amused. "Let me tell you a story," he said, which he did sometimes, and Colette hadn't worked out a pattern for when. "It's a true story, and it happened about a hundred and twenty years ago, before I was so old ..."

Colette fetched her stuffed lion Andronicus and tucked herself in while she listened to her father explain about the Compte du Plaisaid and his Copper Men, from an era when clanks were still oddities and Simon Voltaire had only just finished weaving together his city with electric nerves. It was a true story, so it was very long and complicated, and Colette was trying to hide her yawns by the time her father started listing off: "The lightning cannons missed, because he had a power attractor. The Gendarmy were forced into a retreat when their autoswords broke down. The Copper Men were so heavy, they could just wade through when we diverted the Bièvre into their path. Now, what do you think I did then?"

It was a test, and if she didn't get it right it would be a lesson. Colette very much wanted to get it right and make her father happy. She held Andronicus close while she thought about it. 'Strategic' meant big and connected, so her father must have done something big that used two of the subsystems he'd already tried. She frowned. It couldn't be that simple, could it? "Used the lightning cannons on the water?"

"And got past the attractor that way. Exactly." Her father smiled; it made the wrinkles around his eyes more obvious. "It seems simple now, but the cannoneer captain and the hydrologist never thought of it, because they were each doing their absolute best, in their own area of expertise, with the things they commanded. I could do better, because I was thinking of all of Paris at once. Watching it all. It was hard then, and now, I'm afraid, it's almost impossible. Paris is vastly more complicated. Even the subsystems need someone who can think about enormous things all at once."

Colette put her stuffed lion on her shoulder and looked out the window. Her bedroom was on the top of the château, with a skylight and a good view, and if she squinted she could just make out the smudge of cloud-blurred purple where the Awful Tower peeked over the tops of the building between it and the château. She wondered if her father could see it from where he really was if she flashed her bedroom lamp on and off, or if he would just have to _know_. She wondered if she would have to think like that when she was old enough.

But Paris was only a hundred square kilometers. She could already work out how to get places when her tutor took her on walks, and draw a passable map from memory, and surely Colette could add the rest in a few years. 

"I'll learn as fast as I can," she said, as much to herself as her father. 

He sighed. "I hope so, chérie."

\--

The news that the Incorruptible Library was, after a tense three years, re-opening its stacks to the public, was greeted with general jubilation. It extended as far as the Pont-Marie School for Scientific Potential, where Colette spent her days pretending to learn algebra and chemistry and Romanian, but actually learning sociology by observation, and the Romanian teacher arrived one morning late and beaming to announce it. It wasn't news to Colette, after the tense negotiations her father had spent the last week ranting about every night. She shut her workbook while Lucas Von Rilke said "What's so amazing about that? We have our own library," and Rosalie Prunestoggle said, "The people with the illustrated entomology collection?" and most of the class made assorted confused or happy noises.

Then she leaned over to nudge Aldin Hoffman at the next desk, whose eyes were bright but who hadn't said anything. "Don't you think it would be a good field trip?" she whispered.

Aldin looked paralyzed with indecision. Well, he was eleven, and that was an awkward age for boys. "I don't know ..."

"They're supposed to have books in eighty languages, you know. We could count and make sure."

Aldin looked even more miserable, like he was trying to hide behind his spectacles. "They aren't really going to give a tour to a bunch of random kids."

The implied insult made her bristle and made her want to find whoever had once told Aldin to shut up and kick them, because the Pont-Marie students were _very carefully selected_ and he should be prouder of himself. But saying that would only make him nervous. Colette was doing her best to learn diplomacy. She rolled her eyes and said, "Well, certainly not if you don't _ask_."

It took a few seconds of obvious dithering, but Aldin's hand went up. 

Three days later, almost first in line, Pont-Marie Class Eight trooped out of the giant elevator and into the Incorruptible Library, shepherded by a pale, cheerful woman who'd introduced herself as Subcurator Navarra. Rosalie was already leaning over their teacher's shoulder, trying to read the map. Aldin was staring at the floor, but with swift, furtive glances around. Maybe he'd relax once they were further into the stacks and he had all those books to distract him. Colette took a longer look. They'd done a good job hiding the deathrays behind the decorative plant urns on top of their shelves, but the shelves were unimpressive; all the titles she could actually read from here were in modern French, and the spines looked clean and new. Maybe they just didn't want blood getting on the rare books. 

Sensible of them, Colette thought. She could work with these people. 

\--

It was a rainy April day when Louis Voltaire died. Colette had known it was coming for a while, but coming out of school to find Léonie waiting with a car, already draped in a black shawl and veil, still made the bottom drop out of her stomach.

She got in and slammed the door behind her before her most irritating sister could get a word in. " _When?_ "

Even Léonie knew better than to misunderstand that. "A little before noon," she said. But then she ruined it by going on, "He was ninety-two, chérie, he had a good long run."

Only eighty years older than Colette, and a hundred and fifty younger than Father. Colette sat silently and fumed while Léonie explained that the funeral was probably next Saturday amd she would order a black bombazine for Colette, something with jet beads on the bodice, that would be very suitable. 

After the funeral Colette went straight up to her father's office, let herself in with the five-word code she'd memorized - she had a pocket recording of her father saying it, in the hidden safe in her bedroom, but apparently the lock didn't care whose voice - and perched on the edge of the control console to wait, since the chair would have swallowed her up. Only one screen was lit, tuned to a view down the Rue des Grenouilles, foggy and grey still filling up with the early-evening crowds. She fiddled with the dials until it flickered into the flat expanse of the Seine.

Her father showed up half an hour later. He didn't seem surprised to see her there. Colette waited for him to settle into the oversized chair before she started. No point waffling. "Papa, I want a civic port."

Her father didn't, as her brother Thierry had when she first asked about the golden protrusion set just above his collarbone, pretend not to know what she was talking about. Instead he put his face in his hands. 

It didn't seem any stupider to press on than it had to ask in the first place, so Colette pressed on. "The sooner I start learning to interpret the city directly, the sooner I can help you watch it. Don't tell me you don't need the help, papa. Why else have you been teaching me so much about it?"

Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Maybe she should have kept talking. But her father dropped his hands and suddenly said, "It's not obligatory, you understand."

"Papa?"

"I hoped you would have a mind that could withstand it. I hoped you would learn the city by heart. But if you have the good sense," he half-smiled, "to run away, I would love you no less for it. Julian would rather live in her lab and grow optic crystals. Lisette makes Paris more beautiful with her symphonies. Louis -" his sigh was more emotion than he'd shown through the funeral - "thought someone should make sure the rest of you were better brought up, and in that he was completely right. Paris is heavy. I won't require you to try to lift it."

Colette leaned against the blacked-out screen and crossed her arms. "Well, perhaps you should give me the civic port anyway so I can at least make the attempt."

She does remember, later, that it was the last and only time her father suggested that Colette give up.

\--

Watch Gil Holzfäller, her father told Colette before her second year at the Institut de la Extrordinaire, which she glumly suspected would be the second of twelve. There was so much she could learn and only so many hours in the day, once her secret studies of the city were taken into account. But her father said to watch Gil Holzfäller, and she couldn't do that without befriending him, to the horror of all the other boys mewling for her attention, and barely ten days into the term she found herself throwing rocks to distract a giant crocodile clank while Gil, perched on its back, hastily rewired its control box to explode.

"That was amazing," he said as soon as they were back on dry land. Colette pulled a stray copper scale out of her hair and bitterly contemplated the ways boys could be annoying even if they flew their flag with crossbones. 

She settled for, "Welcome to Paris."

"Do you get a lot of those?" 

"People trying to take over the city? Only every few months, but if there hasn't been some Sparky scheme gone wrong for a week we start checking ourselves for altered memories. Are you planning to go looking for adventures, chéri?"

"I might," Gil admitted. He leapt up onto the brass railing that separated them from the moonlit Seine, if balancing on an inch-wide piece of rounded metal were as easy as strolling down the street. "It's nice to have a real challenge. Where are we, anyway? I got turned around in all those tunnels, I don't know if this is Right or Left Bank anymore."

The university should be west from here, and Colette strode off in that general direction. She expected to hear a thump as Gil leapt back to the pavement, or possibly a splash as he tried to follow on the rail, but no, in a few seconds he was matching her pace along the rail, not even looking nervous. Colette wanted to ask him how he did that, but that wasn't really the important question; the important questions were all ones he probably couldn't answer. Well, she could try for obliquity. "Did you ever get rampaging sparks on Castle Wulfenbach?"

"Not really. The Baron was good at keeping them happy." Gil shrugged. "Of course we never let the really unstable ones on board at all."

That was an advantage, certainly. Paris could only resort to customs controls, and despite the one or two people each year who _declared_ their intention of conquering the city and were summarily detained at the gates, they only helped so much. Colette smirked. "None of them lost their stability on board? It seems to happen all the time down here. One day someone's just trying to build a better mimmoth trap, and the next they're showing that fool from the next office _exactly_ who's a halfhearted plagiarist who doesn't deserve tenure."

Gil blushed a little. "Uh. Twice. But the soup minimizer turned out to be really useful once we disabled the remote mode." We, he kept saying, as if he were personally responsible for the Castle. Well, maybe poking his nose into everything was a long-established habit. 

That wasn't enough reason for her father to set Colette to watching him. There were plenty of amatuer heroes in Paris, and plenty of strong Sparks. She'd have to dig deeper.

\--

Befriending Tarvek Sturmvoraus involved fewer explosions. He took her to the opera. They ate at new haute cuisine restaurants, and obscure little places that had been in one family since the days of the Storm King. They tried to tour the Jardins Botaniques et Abominables, but were interrupted before they got past the _barils de sang_ by a loud screech followed by a huge black-and-white bird, ten meters across at a guess, descending on the plants to rip them open. 

An interesting two hours later they were back at the family château, on the basis that it was only six blocks away and no taxi could have have been expected to carry Tarvek home in his current unfortunate state. The gardener got the worst of it with a hose. Tarvek took the tattered remnants of his dignity to the Chartreuse Suite to wash his hair while Colette fended off five siblings who were convinced her skin was about to peel off, her friend was about to vanish with the family art collection, or both. It took entirely too long to get the two of them, alone, in Colette's room with a tray of bread and soup. Tarvek at least wasn't blushing about being alone in a lady's bedroom. He ran his fingers down her bookshelf with the air of a connoisseur. "I wouldn't have thought you liked fairy tales," he said, and his hand stopped just shy of the stuffed lion at the end of the shelf. "Old friend?"

"Oh yes. I called him Andronicus. Terribly creative, I know."

"Funny coincidence." Tarvek was smiling, but he looked aside before she could tell if it reached his eyes. "I had a giant mimmoth called Andronicus when I was little. My cousin made him for me. He's good with biology."

"You have good taste in names, chéri." She watched him pull himself back from giving the stuffed lion a pat on the head. "Or at least we have bad taste in common."

"We have a lot of things in common," Tarvek informed her lightly. 

Fine, Colette would play flirting. Tarvek had never pushed. "And what would those be, besides our taste in names?"

Tarvek held up a hand, ticking them off on his fingers. "We appreciate complex systems," he began, which was more serious than Colette had expected. "We both have sisters who think we make good lab partners - I have one, you have three, but it's similar in principle. We both like fairy tales." He nodded at the bookshelf again, heavy with Lang and Lazowska. "We stand to inherit powerful and beautiful and complicated places and worry if we're ready for the challenge. And," he finished, brightening slightly, "we both like _pain au chocolat_ for breakfast. How's that for synchronicity?"

"Magnificent," Colette informed him. "We should elope right away." She didn't remark on the part about inheritance; it wasn't absurd Tarvek had guessed that much.

"If only you were serious." Tarvek heaved a sigh. "We would take Europa by storm. You could seduce all the queens from Londinium to Muscovy."

"While you seduced all the kings, and sighed in secret because they weren't Gil Holzfäller?"

The look of pain barely flashed across his face before it vanished beneath a stern scowl. "Don't be absurd. Do you know who he is?"

Maybe. Her friend in Prague had tracked down some interesting records. But Colette was hardly going to admit that. "Beyond an amatuer adventurer?"

"Yes. I - looked in to it, a while back." Tarvek's eyes flashed back and forth in the universal signal for are-there-listening-devices?, and Colette waved a hand: it was her room, she should know it was safe. Tarvek leaned a little closer, anyway, and spoke barely above a whisper. "Most people don't know that Petrus Teufel had a son. The Baron made sure the evidence vanished."

Well. 

"That would explain the strong Spark," Colette murmured, to cover while she tried to think it through. It was amazingly trusting of Tarvek to tell her that. 

\--

Colette finished her Mechanical Systems Analysis degree with top marks and still without a sign of breakthrough. She'd done that one first in the vain hope some particularly thorny problem would be just enough to push her over the edge, which had happened to her sister Julian - seventy-percent-sister, a number that felt like it should be significant, but proved nothing. Even with identical twins, sometimes one got the Spark and one didn't. 

She skipped the commencement ceremony - cheering at Aldin's had been tiresome enough - in favor of finding a lamppost in a quiet alleyway, between a gear factory and a tropical fruit warehouse, and pulling it open to watch from there. The grey and green humming down the other screen were easy enough to watch with half a mind. She was two minutes from surprised when her father turned up beside her. 

"Have you decided what you're studying next?" he asked. He knew better than to ask why she was there. 

Colette shrugged. "Political science, unless Professor Higgins starts another revolt before January and they have to shut down the department again. I know _she's_ not a Spark, Papa, but do you suppose there's such a thing as a mad political scientist?"

"I have my suspicions," her father said. He looked quite solid; the only clue that he wasn't present in the flesh were the occasional drifting snowflakes vanishing into his jacket, with no pause and no damp spot left behind. It was amazing the projection was so good here. "The last Princess of Monaco convinced four popes to bless her reign without tithe guarantees, which qualifies as a minor miracle. But most Sparks have charisma. Planning a few impossible agreements yourself?"

"That," Colette informed him, folding her arms, "would require being a Spark. I'll have to settle for keeping blackmail material on everyone."

"Hhmph." The wrinkles around her father's eyes crinkled into something that could have been mistaken for a smile. 

\--

When the Immortal Library closed its stacks to outsiders again, it was the result of multiple incidents, the inevitable slow progression of offenses that came with dealing with the public. Colette knew; she'd read the diplomatic messages to her father. That business in the North Catacombs was probably going to come to blows, or rather, to sudden tunnel collapses. They couldn't possibly _win_. Make themselves more trouble that the catacombs were worth, maybe.

But that was all in the realm of speculation when they closed the stacks, abruptly and without announcing their decision. Colette and Gil and their friend Ardsley Wooster found out when they took the elevator down to the familiar entryway with the deathrays not quite hidden behind the decorative plant urns, and found it free of decorative plant urns, deathrays, books, and further doorways. Perched between the empty shelves was a massive clank festooned with spindled stacks of cards, two typewriter keysets on each side. The wooden wall where the gate had stood had a small slot in it, with a neatly lettered sign: DEPOSIT LOAN REQUESTS HERE. 

It only took a few shocked seconds before Wooster rounded on Gil. "I told you," he said, and then broke into English as he went on, " _That business with the resonant frequency was a bad idea! They've put up a whole bloody wall to keep you out! Do you have the least idea what this is going to do to everyone's research projects?_ " He sounded a lot stroppier and more aristocratic in his native tongue, but Colette supposed even the best spies couldn't keep up the act constantly.

Gil desperately waved his hands in the air and pointed at the sign. " _Look, it'll be fine, they're still lending out books._ "

" _You imbecilic troglodyte!_ "

She'd have to look up _troglodyte_ later - her English still hit gaps sometimes - but for now, Colette decided, the most important thing was to interrupt them. "Gentlemen," she began, which was rare enough to get their attention. "Do you really think the Library will re-open faster if you have a fistfight in their entryway?"

They looked apologetic and shuffled their feet, and Gil sheepishly asked, "Reopen? Do they do this a lot?" 

"About ten years after they open, every time for the last century." They'd barely lasted eight this time, but it had been an eventful few years.

"Well, they wasted no time," Wooster bitterly declared, and then they were off again.

She related the subsequent argument to Seffie the next day, over glasses of fizzy wine, as they hid upstairs from the noise and bustle of her grandmother's party and especially from her handsy second cousin Xantippus. Seffie rolled her eyes and said, "They'll grow up someday." Which was funnier than it should have been coming from a fifteen-year-old, but was also, probably, true. "Did Gil really rescue that nightclub singer from the giant nasturtiums? He didn't tell me about it." 

"I think he didn't want to make you jealous." Colette chuckled. Seffie had gotten herself out of trouble very efficiently that time, and Colette had only needed to extract her from the gendarmes afterward before her strained nerves gave out.

"Jealous? Of someone without the common sense to carry a pair of scissors?" Seffie tossed back a gulp of wine, and promptly started coughing so hard Colette had to clap her on the back. 

Seffie looked gorgeous in green, and her skin was smooth and warm, and if Colette wasn't very careful with her thoughts Gil might have to worry about _jealousy_ after all.

\--

The news of what had happened to Mechanicsburg reached Paris in under a day, escorted by a cloud of improbable rumours. They said that Baron Wulfenbach had blown up Castle Heterodyne. That the Lady Heterodyne had killed him. That the Lady Heterodyne had taken him captive, with the aid of the Jägers and a clowder of giant mechanical cats, and was even now busy replacing his brain. That the Storm King had taken his throne and claimed the Heterodyne as his bride. That the bubble around the town was a shield against invasion, and any day now it would drop to reveal terrifying new weapons. That the Baron's son had gone mad, or madder, and melted Mechanicsburg. That the Baron's son had crashed Castle Wulfenbach into Castle Heterodyne to kill the new Storm King. That last one Colette was sure was some creative miscreant's contribution, not a distorted speculation on bad evidence.

The truth, as opposed to news, filtered in over the next few weeks, with copious assistance from the analysts of the Master's Eyes. Seffie offered up that her brother and Tarvek had both been inside. Soon after there was a terse note from Gil - Baron Wulfenbach - to her father, requesting the services of Professor Dio Zardilev for reasons he didn't specify. They knew, though; their spies had already passed on the truth about the stopped-time effect. There was no way it would stay secret for long.

"Damned young fool," was her father's comment. "Everyone is safer without that town."

Colette wasn't sure of the odds on that, but it had been a tourist town for most of her life. Instead she asked, "Do you really think it will stay gone?"

Her father was rubbing at his forehead in the old futile stave-off-a-headache gesture. "No," he admitted. "But the Empire is collapsing. He doesn't need any _more_ trouble." It struck Colette, with painful suddenness, how very old her father looked. Of course he looked old - two hundred fifty years would wear down any human - but she was sure the wrinkles hadn't been quite so deep when she was a little girl. He looked exhausted.

The Long War wasn't so very long ago. 

"The Conductor General sent a letter," her father went on. "The Corbettites want to know how many refugees they can send to Paris, if _the situation deteriorates further_. For the moment they're still trying to settle them close to wherever they came from." He was staring fixedly at the office screen, where a delighted crowd were pouring out of the Théâtre Incendiaire. He said, mostly to himself, "Paris was supposed to be a safe place. Somewhere beauty could flourish. Where _anyone_ could come to better themselves."

And scrabbling for work in the streets of Paris was better than being eaten by giant squid or trampled by a mob with bad aim or whatever other awful fates were waiting for townspeople who couldn't get out of the way of the rebellions in time, but Paris was only a hundred square kilometers. Living space, food supply - bits and pieces, she'd have to talk Doctor Rasimus into reassembling his potato cannon, that business with the redshifted greenhouses had been very promising, and it was probably time to give Saint Teodora's Hospital that extra wing they'd been angling for - well. Colette would have to run the numbers, but a ten-percent population increase over the next year shouldn't starve anyone. 

It might not matter. The Corbettites could only bring them refugees who lived long enough to get to an open station. 

"We'll make it work," she told him.

Her father smiled at that, and Colette wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder. Some kind of reassurance. "Paris will be safe," he said. "One way or another, even if the rest of Europa is in flames. You could make sure of that, couldn't you, Colette?"

"I'd try, Papa," she said, and it was an evasion but it seemed to satisfy him.

There was a letter in her pocket. Tarvek had sent it, the afternoon before his father died, and in the general confusion and chaos it took most of a month to make its way across the continent. It was amazing that it turned up at all. _Nothing is moving here,_ he'd told her. _The snow is almost melted but the fortress might as well be a solid block of ice. My father is deep in some biological experiment, and my sister is amusing herself with the castle cats, and I'm abusing my interlibrary loan privileges. It must be warm in Paris by now; it must be sweltering. Tell me all about it, chérie. Remind me that there's one place in the world where the world is still spinning._ It was dramatic and maudlin and, in retrospect, horribly ironic. 

Seffie said he was trapped in Mechanicsburg. Safe, while the world outside had to deal with the fallout.

\--

Colette remembers this party later, because it was the last one before the end. She turned up in green. Seffie was in blue, as always, and beckoned her close to whisper everyone's secrets into her ear, "The new Lady Bonhamie used to dance at the Eau-de-Nil Cabaret in Vienna" or "She's trying to buy up shares in the tin mines, the deal is very delicate" or "Of course they don't have a chance with Gil. He's immune to flimflam." This with a rueful little smile, the sort Seffie always wore when she was talking about Gil. Colette could sympathize. 

She couldn't forget, though, that they weren't necessarily on the same side.

"I might get to hear him rant about it, depending on timing," Seffie was telling her. "I'm going back to Castle Wulfenbach tomorrow. We have to work out how to deal with that dreadful business in Borxenburg. But don't spread that around; everyone in Paris has an opinion and I'm tired of hearing them. They'll find some new obsession next week." She sighed, the familiar sigh of someone sick of being diplomatic.

It was easy enough to turn the commiserating touch of their fingers into holding hands, and press her other to her friend's waist. Colette smirked. "We could give them something to talk about," she offered.

"Oh, that hardly counts as scandalous." Seffie was grinning.

"Not to anyone under thirty-five, perhaps."

"Not if it involves _you_." But Seffie's hand was already on Colette's shoulder, and the next waltz was spinning out onto the floor, and it was the easiest thing in the world to follow it out, in smooth steady steps. Seffie kept effortlessly close, leaning in just a little more than the dance required. 

Colette could imagine the whispers spreading out like ripples in water. Distracting. She gave Seffie an impromptu spin; both their gowns twirled out behind them like petals. The glow-lights twinkled overhead and the music engine kept playing. It was all so beautiful. 

It is all so beautiful. She wants to remember everything. 

\--

It all flashes past Colette in an instant. It all happened in Paris. In Paris she sees _everything_. 

Her own voice is echoing in her skull, bone conduction and microphone both as her perceptions burst outward. The little civic port is glowing in her throat as she pulls in more power, she needs it all, she can't worry about things like arcing. Her wig is gone; Tarvek is pouring the foam down her shoulders and that will have to be enough, it's taking away some of the excess, enough to keep her alive while she works out how to divert it into _light_. 

It's all so _obvious_ now, she can see the _fabric_ of the _city_ , every detail, people in fifty-eight thousand twelve private houses fumbling to check fuseboxes in the dark, eight hundred forty-three people trapped on elevators, ninety-five city guards on the Rue des Grenouilles distracted from the mob by the dark streetlights, sixteen knights still following Martellus, one Spark staring up at the _fragile shell_ that _used to trap her consciousness_ like _a goddess_.

Colette can finally see how it all works.

And _now she can_ -

\--

Too much for one mind to contain, but Colette has a whole city to think with now. She remembers that moment, later.

\---


End file.
